Gene Nichol has resigned Sunday as president of the College of William & Mary. When the Board of Visitors decided not to renew his contract, he resigned immediately. He issued this statement today:
I was informed by the Rector on Sunday, after our Charter Day celebrations, that my contract will not be renewed in July. Appropriately, serving the College in the wake of such a decision is beyond my imagining. Accordingly, I have advised the Rector, and announce today, effective immediately, my resignation as president of the College of William & Mary. I return to the faculty of the school of law to resume teaching and writing.
In his resignation statement, Nichol offered a vigorous defense of his administration, including his controversial decisions to remove the cross from the Wren Chapel and to permit an itinerant show of sex workers to perform on campus. But he conceded, “I have sometimes moved too swiftly, and perhaps paid insufficient attention to the processes and practices of a strong and complex university.”
While Nichol praised William & Mary as an institution, he was less charitable to the Board of Visitors, noting that he and his wife had been offered “substantial economic incentives” if we would agree “not to characterize [the non-renewal decision] as based on ideological grounds.” He rejected the offer, he said, because it would have required him to “make statements I believe to be untrue and that I believe most would find non-credible. I’ve said before that the values of the College are not for sale. Neither are ours.”
The Board also issued a statement, contending that the decision was not based upon ideology or any one of Nichols’ decisions. Indeed, the board statement was fulsome in its praise for Nichol, and criticized those who made “uncharitable personal assaults” upon him. The statement never quite gets around to saying why the Board declined to renew Nichols’ contract, however. This is as close as it got:
After an exhaustive review … the Board believed there were a number of problems that were keeping the College from reaching its full potential and concluded that those issues could not be effectively remedied without a change of leadership.
Del. Tim Hugo, R-Centreville, who was one of his more vocal critics, summed it up this way: “His tenure has seen an unending string of political controversies. He is a nice man, but, I do not believe that he ever made the successful transition from political activist to college president. I wish him well in his future endeavors.”
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